ican rule, and is buried in the
old Mission Dolores cemetery, where the finest monument in the cemetery
stands erected to his memory.]

I am glad to see this bronze tablet affixed to this noble adobe
building. I take it, that when some of the wooden eye-sores that here
abound are torn down, in the necessary beautification that should
precede 1915, this old historic building--a monument to Spanish
chivalry and hospitality--will be spared. We have too few of them left
to lose any of them now. And of all buildings in the world, the Presidio
army post should guard this one with jealous care, for here was enacted
one of the greatest, sweetest, most tragic love stories of the world--a
story which is all the Presidio's own, and which it does not have to
share with any other army post.

To you, men of the army, my appeal ought to be an easy one. You have no
desire to escape the soft impeachment that the profession of arms has
ever been susceptible to the charms of woman. The relation of Mars to
Venus is not simply a legend of history, is founded on no mere
mythology--their relationship is as sure as the firmament, and their
orbits are sometimes very close together.

There is one name that should be the perennial toast of the men of this
Presidio. We have just celebrated by a splendid pageant the
four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Pacific Ocean by
Balboa, and we chose for queen of that ceremony a beautiful girl by the
name of Conchita. There was another Conchita once, the daughter of the
comandante of this Presidio, the bewitching, the beautiful, the radiant
Concha Argueello.

In this old Presidio she was born. In the old Mission Dolores she was
christened. Here, it is told, that in the merry exuberance of her
innocent babyhood, she danced instead of prayed before the shrine. In
the glory of these sunrises and day-vistas and sunsets, she passed her
girlhood and bloomed into womanhood. In this old adobe building she
queened it supremely. Here she presided at every hospitality; here she
was the leader of every fiesta.

To this bay, on the 8th of April, 1806[11], in the absence of her stern
old father in Monterey, and while the Presidio was under the temporary
command of her brother Luis, there came from the north the "Juno," the
vessel of the Russian Chamberlain Rezanov, his secret mission an
intrigue of some kind concerning this wonderland, for the benefit of the
great Czar at St. Petersburg. He found no dif